Harvard students launched the first college radio club in 1906
100 years of student radio history in the DLARC college radio collections
The Internet Archive's DLARC college radio collections trace student radio from a forgotten 1906 Harvard club to 1920s broadcast experiments at Dartmouth and the Milwaukee School of Engineering, plus newly digitized materials from Amherst, Middlebury, and William & Mary. The archives preserve handmade posters, DJ manuals, QSL cards, and even a 1987 WMSE metal chart tracking airplay for Slayer and Megadeth.
In 1906, students at Harvard University offered to send wireless messages across "the yard" as part of the activities of the Weld Phonepterograph Company, which founder Robert Gowen described as "the first college radio club."